Olive Garden

The sickness has hit my family these last few weeks pretty hard. I thought we were making some headway but this a.m. Bug woke up with a barking cough so I am up early and intend to do some catch up with my blogging.

A few weeks ago while running errands, moments after I’d realized that I hadn’t had anything to eat that day, I started to have a blood sugar low. I was feeling dizzy and nauseous so we decided to stop and get some lunch at the closest place to where we were, which just happened to be Olive Garden. I figured it couldn’t be busy at 2 on a Saturday, right? Wrong. But, within 15-20 minutes we were sitting at our table and I begged the waitress to bring us anything asap before I started to eat sugar packets.

I appreciate when we are seated in a low traffic area and that day they put us in a corner so we were able to sort of tuck Bug in the back, which was helpful in trying to thwart her constant escape attempts. I’m not a fan of their chairs with rollers on the bottom though because they move very easily and Bug fell off of hers and almost hit her face on the table when she was leaning forward to color so dh and I spent the rest of the meal with our feet wrapped around the bottom so it wouldn’t slide. The food arrived quickly and was good, but Bug’s plate was scorching hot when they set it right in front of her. Prices seemed higher than what I remember. Most of the children’s items were around $5, which includes a drink but says “Share the grown-ups breadsticks and salad with your meal.” For $5, the portion seemed pretty small, heck even my adult portion seemed pretty small.

While we ate, I started to brainstorm different things that would be really helpful in restaurants. Besides foot stools in the bathrooms, what about bringing them their color pages/crayons if there is a wait, or providing smaller utensils so they can eat easier? The only picture that I was able to get during my low blood sugar madness was of Bug’s fork, which was massively huge.

The bathrooms seemed clean, which is always nice, especially when your toddler says she needs to go potty, but then when you get her in there she’d rather play with the toilet paper and collapses on the floor when you try to pick her up to sit on the potty “just in case.” No foot stools though. The changing area for babies had lots of room so that you wouldn’t have to move out of the way to let other in/out of stalls.

Overall it was okay and I’m grateful that we received pretty quick food once we were seated. But, the prices are a little out of our range right now, especially so since their portion size was pretty small, so I don’t think we’ll be going back anytime soon.